Encouragement and Unspeakable Joy!

What a difference a week makes!  Or 8 months.  I am a week and 2 days out from my final reconstruction surgery.  The swelling is gone, the pain is getting better, the stitches have been removed and things are looking good.  I wanted to write a post to encourage those women that have to go through the same procedures.  The journey is hard, painful, stressful, discouraging, sad.....but in the end....it is worth it.  I have talked on this blog many times about the pain and internal turmoil I experienced the first time I saw myself after my double mastectomy and how it took weeks...maybe even months for me to look at myself without crying.  Sometimes crying the whole remainder of the day.  It was hard to experience and hard to believe that I would ever look normal again.  God was with me though and I prayed and prayed that the doctors and my husband would be right.  That I would be able to look at myself and be okay with it.  That God would answer my prayer and I would look normal again.  I know a lot of you prayed as well.

I am here as a witness now to say, "I look pretty darn good!".  God answered those prayers!  In some ways, I look better than I did before I had breast cancer.  I am very happy with the results.  The surgeon was able to use new technologies to do so much...it is pretty unbelievable.  I still have a lot of healing left, but things should improve week by week.  My scars will eventually fade and as far as I can tell....no one would ever know I have breast implants under this skin.  The implants we chose look so natural.  I didn't want to look fake and I don't.  Praise God!  The tissue expanders felt like rocks....the implants feel so much better.  They took the sutures/stitches out yesterday so those areas still need healing and I still have dissolving stitches all along the bottom of my breasts, but I have joy today.  I can see now what the doctor and my husband kept telling me in the beginning.  I would look normal again and I would be happy with it.  I am.  I am grateful to God for blessing me so much.  I am so so so grateful that my husband is excited and very happy as well at how things are looking.  lol!  As a married woman, this means more to me than my own acceptance of myself. <tears are falling from my eyes now.  Tears of joy.> But, to have both (mine and my husband's joy in it) and not having to feel like I "look as good as can be expected after breast cancer".....but I "look good" and believe I will look great in weeks to come is huge to me....this is HUGE to me.  God's grace.  God's love for me.  It overwhelms me.

How I look shouldn't matter.  I know this.  Who really sees me anyway besides myself and my husband?  But, it matters.  It matters that I feel beautiful for my husband.  It would matter even if I was a single woman.  It matters that underneath it all I'm not left with the memory of the horror of it every time I see myself without clothes, but instead the beauty of what God has done for me.  He brought me through a very hard time and left me better than I was before.  Not just on the outside, but also on the inside.  Only my Lord can do something this powerful.   Oh, how I love Him.  I know it mattered to my Father because it mattered to me.  He doesn't do things small.....He delivers BIG.  He is the Creator of the world....why couldn't He make me look great again?  Of course He can!  He made man from the dust of the earth....He spoke the world into being.  He healed me from cancer, He walked with me through it all, He gave me strength to endure it and HE gives me this joy today.  I am so thankful and blessed.

"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit." - Romans 15:13

This song....is so fitting for my heart today and for the season - UNSPEAKABLE JOY!